Terminal
A plain shell in a subshell pane: no agent, nothing to install, and it is why a clean machine is launchable.
The Terminal plugin is a subshell that drives no agent at all: your shell, in a tmux pane, watched through the browser like any other subshell. It is the one built-in with nothing to install, which is exactly what makes a brand-new machine launchable before you have put an agent CLI on it.
What it runs
A terminal subshell starts your shell bare: whatever SHELL names on that machine, falling back to bash. tmux supplies the pseudoterminal, so the shell behaves as it would in any window. One flag is worth knowing about if you launch one from the preset editor: -l starts a login shell, sourcing your full profile.
Detection works like every other plugin's (a shell is a binary, found the same way), so the Terminal row in a launch picker means this machine has a shell to run, which is true of every machine where Subshell itself runs.
What a terminal subshell is, and is not
It has no agent, and so it declares no capabilities: no MCP wiring, no resume, no attention hooks. A turn does not "complete" and there is nothing to notify about; it is your prompt, waiting exactly as long as you take.
Everything else Subshell does still applies, because none of it lives in the harness:
- Sharing: grant someone view or edit on the pane; they watch or type in your shell.
- Workspaces and panes: arrange terminals beside agents on one grid.
- Pane logs: everything typed and printed lands in the subshell's log file, as with any harness.
- Nodes: a terminal subshell is often the fastest way to look at a machine you enrolled; it is a browser-based tmux session on that host, with no SSH hop.
One small difference: a terminal never tells Subshell its own title, because a shell has no session-name to set. The pane title follows whatever your shell prompt sets until you name the subshell; naming it locks the name, same as with an agent.
Why it is built in
On a fresh install of everything (control plane up, a node enrolled, no agent CLI anywhere), Terminal is launchable, and so is the rest of the first-run tour. You never have to install an agent just to discover what Subshell looks like.
See also
- Your First Subshell: the shortest path to a pane, agent or not
- Agents overview: the other five built-ins and how plugins work
- Sharing: what an audience can see and do in your shell
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